Active Use of Analogy Method With Technology in Education

What Is Analogy?

The term 'analogy', which expresses the comparison of the structures and relationships between two fields or concepts, is considered as a teaching strategy, and a teaching technique in a wide range of sources in the literature. Often used as a teaching method in physical sciences, analogies are defined as a means of understanding the unknown concept through the parallels between the known and unknown concepts among the concepts consisting of common structures (Gentner, 1983), using a well-known concept in describing a new (firstly encountered) concept that is complicated or difficult to understand and thus explaining this new (unknown) situation (Dagher, 1995), and a strategy that facilitates learning and helps relate new information to the knowledge the students have already learned (Bilaloglu, 2005). Using analogies, it is essential to use a previously known fact/situation to describe a new phenomenon/situation encountered for the first time. Herein, the word “target” is used to refer to the newly-encountered phenomenon/situation to be learned/taught for the first time, while the words “source, tool or analog” are used referring to the previously known, familiar fact/situation in order to explain this situation (Dagher, 1995; Gentner, 1983; Spellman & Holyoak, 1996). Analogies are a type of model and its main purpose is to simplify what try to understand and thus help us focus on the attributes of a particular part or a specific feature (Coll, 2009). According to Coll, the working principle of analogies is to establish mental connections between the familiar concept and the scientific concept (the one that is tried to be understood). Analogies represent the comparison of structures and relationships between two fields. One of two fields in question is a familiar concept that is already known, while the other one (the target concept) is defined based on the information in the known concept (Duit, 1991). Analogy, in the most general sense, is the ability to think of relational patterns (Gentner et al., 2001).

Analogy is one of the effective cognitive mechanisms used to find out new concepts and draw conclusions. It has a significant role in learning and developing cognitive concepts. Analogies have long been known to contribute to the emergence of new discoveries as well as the revelation of the embedded ideas or concepts (Thiele & Treagust, 1991, p.5). Analogies have long been used since they have an intense reminding power, present mental pictures to the listener and allow them to transfer the information from the known to the unknown quite instantaneously (Harrison, 1992).

The process of associating concepts using analogies is an essential part of human thinking (Glynn, 1989). This is because learning is essentially about creating analogies between the concepts to be learned and the ones that are already known. Analogies serve as a bridge between the existing knowledge and the new information; they give new insights and viewpoints to the learner and provide the opportunity to concretize abstract concepts and visualize and make sense of them (Yerrick, Doster, Nugent, Parke & Crawley, 2003). Therefore, analogies could be suggested to play a significant role in the constructivist learning theory (Duit, 1991; Pittman, 1999).